Alec Saunders, Senior VP of Developer Relations at RIM, has gotten a lot of attention in the media over the last 24 hours about some tweets he wrote regarding sideloading apps on future builds of the PlayBook OS. Today, he has released a statement to clarify those tweets and reassure the developer community that sideloading is not going anywhere as a dev tool, but simply being modified to prevent piracy.

In a new blog post on the Inside BlackBerry Dev Blog, Saunders explains how starting with the next build on the PlayBook (we're assuming a 2.0.1.xxxx build) there will be a new feature implemented that will encrypt purchased apps to prevent them from being shared with non-paying parties.

This is great news for devs as not only will they not lose a valuable tool, but will also gain more security over where their apps are being loaded.